September 4

"And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead." Romans 1:4

THE resurrection of the Redeemer established the truth of His godhead. His miracles had already proved the truth of His Divine Sonship. Yet there wanted one other evidence, the crowning one of all—the resurrection. This one evidence would put the final seal upon the truth of His Deity. If not, then all that He had previously said, predicted, and done would prove but to have been, as His enemies would have asserted, the stratagem of a designing man, attempting to impose upon the credulity of a few devoted but deluded followers. But this return to life on the exact day which He had predicted, breaking by the exercise of His divine power from the cold embrace of death and the imprisonment of the grave, put at rest forever the question of His Deity, and declared Him to be the Son of God. Oh, how truly and properly Divine did He now appear! August and convincing as had been all the previous attestations of His Godhead—His life one succession of the most astonishing and brilliant achievements of Divine power and goodness—diseases healed, sight restored, demons ejected, the dead raised, tempests hushed, and winds stilled—His death marked by prodigies of terrible and surpassing wonder and sublimity—the earth heaving beneath His feet, the sun darkening above Him, the graves opening around Him—yet never had His Godhead shone forth with such demonstrative power and resplendent glory, as when He broke forth from the tomb, and rose triumphant over hell, death, and the grave.

Then did He fulfil this prediction, and redeem this pledge—"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again." Receding for a while from communion with life—as if to create a pause in nature, which would awaken the interest and fix the gaze of the intelligent universe upon one stupendous event—He disappeared within the very domain of the "king of terrors," wrapped around Him its shroud and darkness, and laid Himself down, Essential Life locked in the embrace of death, immortality slumbering in the tomb! But he rose again; bursting from the cold embrace, and awaking from the mysterious slumber, He came back to life all radiant, immortal, and divine! Saint of God! want you further and stronger evidence that your faith has credited no cunningly devised fable? that He to whose guardianship you have committed your precious soul is able to keep it until the morning of our own resurrection-glory? Behold it in the risen life of the incarnate God! He has come up from the grave, to make good all His previous claims to Deity, thus to encourage and confirm your belief in the truth, dignity, and glory of His person, and to assure you that he that "believes in Him shall not be ashamed." Now may you take up the triumphant strain, as it falls from the lips of the departing apostle, prolonging it until another shall catch it from your expiring tongue, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day."